“Daddy, please…” Xoe has her hands together, tears rolling down her face, and I think she’s the only one of my children above ground that has any idea what real consequences are. She’s afraid, but the rest of them have had it too easy.
I created paradise for them, a beautiful, safe place for our family to flourish, to grow—but I made a mistake.
They never had to work for it. Never had to put in the blood, sweat, and tears that it takes to make a family work. To keep a family together.
And that left the door open for Richter to bring chaos into my home.
Into my fucking house. My family.
But it’s okay. I can learn lessons even at my age, and I remember just how to teach them about consequences.
We can still get this family back on track.
And I’ll drag all of them through it if I have to.
Thirty-Two
Skylar
Richter’s dead.
The thought plays over and over in my mind like a horror movie on loop. He tried to protect his family the way Dad taught him to, but Bryden… he showed more signs of Dad in Richter’s final moments than my brother ever did in his entire life.
Cleo’s incessant crying sounds so much further away than it should as I take a tentative step off the front porch, then another and another until I’m making my way toward the oubliette. Maybe what I saw wasn’t the truth, because sometimes a trauma can cause someone to see things that aren’t always there. And no house holds more traumas than the one I’ve grown up in.
“Richter?” I call out in a voice that I don’t quite recognize. The closer I get to Bryden and the oubliette, the more I feel that this might have been nothing more than a bad dream, and when I look down there… there won’t be anything other than dried leaves poking out through the freshly fallen snow.
I take a deep breath and close my eyes when I’m a few feet away from the oubliette—the place where all ‘useless fucking kids’ go, where all of the Greene women end up when their husbands are done with them, and I feel a bead of sweat roll down my spine. Even against the bitter cold of early winter, my body is reacting in a way that only a defiant Greene woman would.
Opening my eyes, Bryden is gone. It’s just me and the hole to hell. Licking my lips, I take the last few steps toward the oubliette, drop to my knees, and grip the lips of punishment, leaning over just enough to see the inside wall. I don’t want to look to the bottom yet, because even though I can hear the ragged breaths deep inside, I know that if I see him… then it’s true after all.
But I know what it’s like to be at the bottom of the well, and he’s my brother. If there’s the slightest chance that he’s alive, I have to try to get him out.
I lick my lips nervously as I lean over again, this time enough to see as far down as the darkness will allow.
“Richter?” I call out again.
He doesn’t answer me, not verbally anyway. Only the gentle sounds of his gurgling breaths greet me, and I can almost swear that I see the outline of his body against the snow. But… it can’t be; not with the way his head is twisted.
A strangled sob escapes me, reminiscent of his breathing as I push myself back to my feet. I look around frantically for the rope ladder that Dad kept near the oubliette each and every time he would punish Mom by putting her down in the darkness, but it’s nowhere to be found. That’s when I remember that Richter set it on fire after the one and only time he put me in there because he said the temptation would always be there for him to do it again and he was trying so desperately to be more like Mom than Dad.
At least… until he found Cleo.
But that was before Bryden and his family.
A time when I was happier than I am now, which says a lot because that was never true happiness, but it was all we had. As long as I followed my brother’s rules, he was content for the most part. The need to be a family again—a complete family—is what drove him to search for our little sister. It’s what drove him to find Bryden; it’s what led to the destruction of our life here.
I brush the tears away from my eyes as I lift one of my legs over the edge of the oubliette, determined to go down to my brother. Even if I can’t pull him out, at the very least I know he shouldn’t die alone.
“Not so fast,” a voice says softly into my ear. A strong pair of arms quickly slide around my waist and pull me away from the lip, but not without a fight. I swing wildly at the person keeping me from my brother, managing to connect at least once with my fist. The familiar, now sour, scent of Casey invades my senses, causing me to reach back and grab a fistful of his hair, pulling as hard as I can—but he doesn’t let go. “Skylar you have to calm down. It’s okay. This is how it has to be.”
“Let me go!” I scream at him as I kick my legs in the air to no avail. He’s taking me farther and farther away from Richter and I can’t let him die alone.
“Take her inside, son,” Bryden says to Casey as he wrestles me onto the porch.
“Where do I put her?” he asks his father through harsh breaths. I pull on his hair again, turning his head to the side, but still he refuses to loosen his grip.
“The living room will
